Wu Hsien (24 November 1893-8 August 1959), internationally known biochemist who between 1917 and 1920, with Otto Folin of Harvard University, developed the Folin-Wu method of blood analysis. Wu's research interests were primarily in protein chemistry and nutrition. He was also known for his contribution to modern medical education in China as head of the department of biochemistry at Peking Union Medical College (1924-41).

A native of Foochow, Fukien, Wu Hsien was born into a scholarly family. He received his early education in the conventional Chinese curriculum. In 1906 he entered the Fukien Provincial High School, where he completed the course of study in four years. He competed successfully in government examinations for study abroad in 1910 and went to the United States. In September 1911 he enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in naval architecture, an appropriate field for a son of Fukien province, which had a strong naval tradition. However, while spending the following summer on a farm in New Hampshire, he read Thomas Huxley's essay on "The Physical Basis of Life" and decided to change his major to chemistry. Wu obtained a B.S. degree from M.I.T. in 1916.

After spending another year at M.I.T. as a graduate student and assistant in organic chemistry, Wu entered the graduate school of Harvard University in September 1917 and gained his Ph.D. in biochemistry two years later. While at Harvard he did research under the direction of Dr. Otto Folin of the Harvard Medical School. Wu's thesis, "A System of Blood Analysis," presented a new method for preparing a protein-free blood nitrate suitable for quantitative determination of all important constituents of blood within a single sample of 10 c.c. The method was more convenient and accurate than earlier techniques and permitted analysis from a single drop of blood. During 1919-20, as a research fellow, Wu continued work with Folin on research which came to be designated the Folin-Wu system of blood analysis. Among other contributions, this system permitted determination of blood sugar, a procedure of value to investigators of insulin, the new hormone of the 1920's.

In the summer of 1920 Wu Hsien returned to China to join the staff of the newly organized Peking Union Medical College (PUMC) as an associate professor. In 1924 he was appointed organizer and first head of its department of biochemistry, a post which, with advancement to the rank of professor in 1928, he held until the seizure of the institution by the Japanese in early January 1942.

During these years Wu Hsien participated in a wide variety of professional and public activities. In the summer of 1925 he went to Europe to visit laboratories and to consult with biochemists. In addition to teaching and administrative responsibilities, Wu established and headed a nutrition research laboratory at the PUMC. From 1921 to 1927 he was connected with the chemistry division of the national committee on standardization of scientific terminology, one of the major early tasks in the serious introduction of Western science into China. In 1926 he worked with his colleague Robert K. S. Lim (Lin K'o-sheng, q.v.), professor of physiology at the PUMC, to found the Chinese Physiological Society. Wu served as a member of the editorial board of its journal, the Chinese Journal of Physiology, from 1927 to 1941, when it was forced to cease publication. In 1930 he served as adviser to the Academia Sinica, China's highest organization for advanced research, in establishing its institute of physiology, and Wu himself was elected to membership in the Academia Sinica. From 1935 to 1937 Wu Hsien served as a member of a three-man committee in charge of the administration of the PUMC. Results of his research were published in numerous scientific papers as well as two books: A Treatise on Nutrition (in Chinese, Shanghai, 1929) and Principles of Physical Biochemistry (in English, Peking, 1934). After the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in September 1931, Wu Hsien joined with a prominent group of political independents in founding a journal of opinion, the Tu-li p'ing-lun [independent critic], which began publication in May 1932 and gained widespread recognition and influence. Japanese seizure in early 1942 of Westerncontrolled organizations in north China, including the Peking Union Medical College, temporarily ended Wu Hsien's active career, and for two years he lived in retirement. In March 1944 he left north China and made the hazardous trek through Japanese lines to Szechwan. After arrival at Chungking in April, he was assigned to establish and direct a new nutrition institute to meet wartime exigencies. After completing plans for the new organization, Wu Hsien left China for the United States in July 1944 to serve as nutrition expert attached to a commission sponsored by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) to study China's postwar problems. In that capacity, Wu traveled widely in the United States to visit nutrition and public health institutes, medical schools and hospitals, research laboratoriespharmaceutical houses, and food processing plants. In consultations with American nutritionists, who proposed using soybean preparations instead of dried milk in China, Wu insisted that Chinese children needed cow's milk and won his point—food shipments later sent to China under UNRRA auspices included milk powder. After his return to Chungking at war's end in 1945, Wu reported to National Government agencies on nutrition advances in the United States and expanded plans for the new Nutrition Institute. Late in the year, he returned to Peiping.

In the summer of 1946 the National Government at Nanking, again the capital of China, summoned Wu to make plans for organizing a branch of the National Institute of Health at Peiping. Wu was appointed branch director while holding the concurrent post of director of the Nutrition Institute at Nanking. In July 1947 Wu left for England as one of China's six delegates to the International Physiological Congress at Oxford. After the congress, Wu planned to return to China through the United States. In New York he talked with an old friend, T. P. Hou (Hou Te-pang, q.v.), formerly a contemporary of Wu Hsien at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who had become China's foremost chemical engineer and general manager of the Yungli Chemical Industries Company. Wu proposed the establishment in China of a new institute of human biology under Yungli auspices. This new interest dictated resignation at the end of 1947 from his post with the National Institute of Health at Peiping. In January 1948 he accepted an invitation to become visiting scholar in the department of biochemistry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University in New York. With the requirements of the proposed new institute of human biology in mind, Wu began to acquire new techniques involved in isotope research. During the 18 months (1948-49) which Wu spent at Columbia, he presented a paper on "Nutritional Deficiences in China and Southeast Asia" at the Fourth International Congress of Tropical Medicine and Malaria; participated in meetings of the advisory committee on nutrition of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations; and maintained contact with the American Bureau for Medical Aid to China (ABMAC) regarding China's most urgent requirements.

Meanwhile, the balance in the Chinese civil war had swung in favor of the Communists. In January 1949, on the eve of the entry of Communist troops into Peiping, Wu Hsien's family, still in north China, fled to Shanghai and thence to Hong Kong and San Francisco. Wu accepted an appointment in the autumn of 1949 as visiting professor of biochemistry at the medical college of the University of Alabama in Birmingham. During 1949-50 he also participated in meetings of the committee on calorie requirements of the United Nations. In October 1952 Wu Hsien suffered a coronary thrombosis which led to his resignation from the University of Alabama faculty as of August 1953. He then moved with his family to the Boston area.

At his residence in Brookline, Wu Hsien continued to work on problems connected with publication of the results of research carried out at Alabama. He also completed the first draft of a manuscript entitled "A Guide to Scientific Living" (published by the Academia Sinica in Taiwan in 1953) and began others dealing with Chinese calligraphy, Chinese phonetics, and worjd peace. The study of mathematics and Spanish occupied leisure moments.

In the summer of 1959 he enjoyed a happy reunion with the surgeon and public health expert J. Heng Liu (Liu Jui-heng, q.v.), who was in Cambridge to participate in the fiftieth reunion of his Harvard class. The two men, along with Robert K. S. Lim, had been the first three Chinese to attain professorial rank at the Peking Union Medical College. On 8 August 1959, after suffering a new series of heart attacks, Wu Hsien died in the Massachusetts General Hospital at Boston. Among other organizations, Wu was a member of the American Society of Biological Chemists, the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine, and Sigma Xi. He was an honorary fellow of the Deutsche Akademie fur Naturforschung (Halle) and an advisory board member of Biochimica et Biophysica Acta. His career is recorded in American Men of Science (9th edition) and the International Who's Who in World Medicine.

Shortly after Wu Hsien's death, his widow prepared and published privately (Boston, 1959) a memorial volume containing tributes to Wu by a large number of friends and professional colleagues throughout the world. The bibliography of Wu's publications between 1919 and 1959 contains 159 items. His chief fields of research were clinical chemistry, nutrition, immunochemistry, the metabolism of aminoacids, and gas and electrolytic equilibria. Political events and governmental demands increasingly kept Wu Hsien from the laboratory during his later years, as is indicated by the fact that only 20 scientific research papers were published after 1942. However, his reputation as a sound and original biochemist was secure before the dislocations of international and civil war, and he is remembered as one of the pioneering Chinese scientists of his generation. Wu Hsien's first marriage, arranged by his paternal grandmother, took place before he went to the United States in 1911. After his return to China in 1920, attempts to find common ground with that wife failed, and the marriage was terminated. There were no children. In December 1924 at Shanghai Wu Hsien married Daisy Yen, who then held an assistantship in biochemistry at the Peking Union Medical College. The daughter of a prosperous silver merchant of Shanghai, she had been ranking student in the class of 1921 at Ginling College at Nanking, had received an M.A. from Columbia University, and had become a nutritionist interested in food chemistry. Husband and wife collaborated in research and publication on protein chemistry during the early years of their marriage in China and later worked together on amino-acids at the University of Alabama. Five children were born to Wu Hsien and his wife. The eldest son, Ray Jui Wu, with Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Pennsylvania, engaged in cancer research in New York; the younger son, Ying Victor Wu, Ph.D. from M.I.T., became a physical chemist at Cornell University. The three daughters were : Evelyn Wan-hsien Wu, dietician and science teacher with M.S. from the University of Alabama; Dorothea Wan-lien Wu, music librarian with M.S. from Simmons College; and Christine Wan-ming Wu, M.D., radiologist at the Yale Medical School.